1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to data storage systems and, more particularly, a method and apparatus for performing informed prefetching within a server cluster.
2. Description of the Related Art
Modern computer networks generally comprise a plurality of user computers connected to one another and to a computer server via a communications network. To provide redundancy and high availability of information and applications that are executed upon a computer server, multiple computer servers may be arranged in a cluster, i.e., forming a server cluster. Such server clusters are available under the trademark VERITAS CLUSTER SERVER from Veritas Software Corporation of Mountain View, Calif. In such server clusters, a plurality of servers communicate with one another to facilitate failover redundancy such that when software or hardware (i.e., computer resources) become inoperative on one server, another server can quickly execute the same software that was running on the inoperative server substantially without interruption. As such, a user of server services that are supported on a server cluster would not be substantially impacted by the inoperative server or software.
To ensure that the user is not substantially impacted by a failover process, techniques are needed to make the failover process occur as rapidly as possible. Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus that provides rapid failover of resources from one server to another server within a server cluster.